Developing Intelligence in Your Child: Relaxing Music To Stimulate Your Baby

We’ve talked a few times about how music affects the brain. Music has been proven to cause emotional reactions in people, like happiness or sadness, but can even help make your kid smarter! Below you’ll see how you can use relaxing music to stimulate your baby.

For 50 years, researcher Robert Monroe explored the use of brain stimulation and discovered that using specific sound patterns, you could optimize and boost brain functions. The sounds we receive create different effects on the different areas of the brain. This is why music can help combat insomnia, relax you, reduce stress, regulate pain, and treat insomnia in children. Certain types of music may also stimulate a child’s brain to help properly develop their cognitive skills.

Play music for your baby during your pregnancy

Listening to music during your pregnancy can benefit baby and mom. Music stimulates a cardiac frequency in the baby and starts vibrational resonances that activate the brain cells, stimulating brain development.

Pediatrician Wilmer Lino says that the baby receives the benefits of this music starting at the 5th month if the mom listens to music with high vibrations and ballads. “Not all rhythms will be beneficial. In pregnant women, for example, Mozart’s music is recommended because of the high vibrations, which helps the child vocalize better”.

However, if the mother listens to music like rock or heavy metal, the child won’t receive the same benefits because the music combines different tempos and rhythms that might stress the baby out.

Music also allows the mother-to-be to communicate with their child, because it is able to see how the mom is feeling. Some studies clam that the baby can even remember the songs that they listened to for up to a year after leaving the womb.

Stimulate your baby once he or she is born

Once your baby is born, music is still an important element for their development and upbringing. It helps stimulate the child’s ear and increases the child’s desire to express themselves and be understood. Various studies show that the way an infant’s brain learns how to talk is done by analyzing language and its rhythm. Understanding words and sounds is also an important benefit that music helps with.

One study conducted by the European Union showed that how the brain activates when a baby listens to music is very similar to what happens when an adult listens to music. Music activates the right hemisphere, which boots the emotional aspects of the brain, like musicality and creativity. This ability that music helps us develop can also benefit concentration, attention, and memory.

When a mother sings to her child, she is able to be in tune with the emotional needs of the child. Music also helps reinforce the affective relationships, awakening the child’s emotions and creating a bond between parent and child. Relaxing music helps reduce stress (cortisol, the hormone that creates stress, decreases when we listening to relaxing music) and helps in the production of endorphins (neurotransmitters that make us feel happy).

Once the child is a little older, let them improvise with musical games to help them discover new sounds, and let them create music with what’s around them. The “music” may be a lot to handle, but it’s important for their overall development.

Now that the child can make music, start singing to songs. Add some simple dance moves and play around with the rhythm. Listening and singing along to songs can be stimulating for the child. Have them clap along, sing, or play some kind of instrument.

One final tip: there are a ton of studies that say that Mozart’s music has a positive influence on the baby’s behavior and intellectual and creative development. Try to play some calming music for your child, rather than violent or over-exciting music.